Cinderella
by mcfuz
Summary: The scars on his face never really heal. Lucinda remains with him forever. / Arthur Jarvis, Taylor Kerfield and their lives after the murders. Post 1x20, Happily Ever Aftermath.


The scars on his face never really heal. Lucinda remains with him forever.

* * *

It's the day after _that night_. The house is strangely silent without Lucinda around; Arthur finds her iPod still in its dock, but can't bring himself to press play. The sweeping marble staircase takes him an age to climb back down. Everywhere he turns he sees her; a flick of blonde hair around the corner, a flashing of her white smile.

He thinks about the way she lost it yesterday, whirling on him and raking his cheek with her taloned hand. He thinks about the way she didn't look entirely human.

He's sure his mind is playing tricks on him.

Lunch is tasteless in his mouth, and he's halfway through his cardboard sandwich before he remembers Taylor. She had never liked him; not since the night of the dance when Lucinda had stolen his heart. But he wonders what it must be like being her, to have lost both mother and sister in one foul swoop of a pink-finger nailed hand.

He thinks he might feel sorry for her.

He thinks he should make amends.

But all he does is sit in the kitchen and watch the hour hand on the clock spin round and round and round and round and round.

* * *

The will is brought to him sometime in the week that follows. He isn't sure exactly when; he's lost track of both time and place.

The document is short and concise; all Lucinda's possessions are his. Her loopy signature blooms across the bottom line.

As soon as his lawyer leaves, Arthur takes Lucinda's clothes and burns them in the fireplace, one by one, until all that is left of them are ashes and a smell that makes him sick.

* * *

He puts the house on the market when he can't bear it any longer. Some young couple snaps it up immediately, paying Arthur an exorbitant amount of money so they can move in straight away. All he takes with him when he leaves is a near-empty suitcase, filled only with a pair of Lucinda's favourite shoes and a battered box of aspirin.

* * *

Arthur stays in Portland, as much as he yearns to leave. There is something keeping him there, like he's a fish hooked on a rod and has been reeled in. It is not an entirely pleasant feeling, but he stays in Portland all the same.

He thinks maybe it's because of Taylor. He's seen her twice since the murders, once at the funeral where he hid in the shadows, and once at the supermarket where she wandered listlessly down the aisles, her shopping cart half-full with groceries she would never possibly need. She didn't see him; he made sure of that, ducking behind a tower of fruit and only emerging once she'd wheeled her trolley past, oblivious.

Maybe that's what's keeping him here. The guilt. The shame.

He has to talk to her.

When she opens her door and finds him standing there, he realises she doesn't quite register who he is, at least for a moment. But when her eyes widen and her lips whiten, he knows she knows.

The foot he sticks out to jam the closing door throbs painfully. Taylor walks away and he lets himself inside.

She's in the kitchen, making two cups of coffee. When he tastes his, it's bitter, almost too bitter for him to stand. He notices Taylor barely touches her own cup.

"Why are you here?" she finally asks, fiddling with her coffee spoon.

"I don't know," Arthur answers honestly. The silence swirls around them. They don't speak again.

Hours later, when dusk has melted into night and dawn has dripped down upon the sky, he finally leaves. Taylor watches him go, her eyes red and black at the same time. He can't pretend it wasn't worth it, visiting her. Because it was.

It was worth it a million times over.

* * *

He takes to visiting Taylor as often as he can force himself to, as often as he can steel himself enough to roll out of bed and face the world. Her house is familiar enough to feel like home, and foreign enough to not remind him of how he was connected to Taylor in the first place.

It is on one of these visits, as the two of them sit in the dining room at opposite ends of the table, drinking coffee made with congealed milk and eating too-old biscuits that have long gone stale, that Arthur stands, as if in a trance, walks over to Taylor and crushes his mouth against hers.

The kiss is desperate. It doesn't feel like a mistake, but it doesn't feel right either.

She pulls away, her hand holding up the shirt he's already undone. "We shouldn't," she begins, but they do anyway.

And as they move together it is Lucinda Arthur sees beneath him, her eyes closed in pain or ecstasy, her skin white as a corpse's.

* * *

They keep their affair silent and secret. It's not like they have anyone to tell, anyway.

They both know they're no good for each other; if anything, all they accomplish is deepening the other's wounds; cleansing the other's scars with alcohol and watching them burn.

* * *

He isn't the least bit surprised when he lets himself into Taylor's flat one day to find her spinning a slow ballerina's pirouette from a rope hanging in the foyer. He only wishes she'd taken him with her, because he isn't brave enough to do it himself.

If he was, he would already be ashes scattered in the sea.

* * *

With Taylor gone, there should be nothing left to tie him to Portland. And there isn't. But he still stays; it is all he has ever known. And buried down deep beneath the painful memories of heartless murders and stinging lies, there is still some good left in the city. He visits the church where he and Lucinda were married every Sunday, and though he doesn't step inside, the sun streams through the stained-glass windows to show him the carpet, pews and altar dappled in all the colours of the rainbow.

He sits alone on the park bench where Lucinda said yes to becoming his wife; he visits the department store where he bought the ring.

Arthur visits the cemetery too, but it is not at Lucinda's grave he lays his flowers. Taylor Kerfield's headstone is always in bloom.

* * *

Soon a year, then two, then three have rolled by him. He gets another job, another girlfriend, another life.

He cannot help but compare his job as secretary to his previous as manager.

He cannot help but compare Cora's smile to Lucinda's; her laughing eyes to Taylor's sad ones.

He cannot help but compare this life with the last.

He cannot help but hate himself more every day.

* * *

The official police statement for Arthur Jarvis' death is accidental asphyxiation. Apparently the gas stove sprung a leak during the night and all the windows in the apartment were closed.

Detective Nick Burkhardt knows this was no accident, but he holds his tongue. Some things are better left unsaid and unremembered.

* * *

The scars on his face never did heal, and in death grew red as blood against his snow white skin.


End file.
